The Map

The winner of the Witold Gombrowicz Prize for Literature (2020)

 

Seven stories connected by a fifteenth-century map of the world. Once upon a time, maps used to exhibit the boundaries of the known world. They soothed our fears, and simultaneously ignited our imagination, uncharted territory beckoning us from afar.

Barbara Sadurska’s The Map – belligerent and refreshing in tone, narratively picaresque and nostalgic, structurally non-linear and precisely framed – does not attempt to cover hackneyed ground. It goes much further. In entertaining, it instructs. In instructing, it terrifies. It illuminates the fact that man knows as little about himself as the first cartographers knew about the world.